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The Politics of Extinction
Remain a parasite OR become an Earth
Warrior.

By Captain Paul Watson

We are at the present time living in an age of mass extinction. Each year,
more than 20,000 unique species disappear from this planet forever. This
represents more that two species per hour. Species extinction is the fuel that
supports the ever increasing progress of the machinery of civilization.

Individual humans are for the most part insulated from the reality of
species loss. Alienated from the natural world, guided by anthropocentric
attitudes, the average human being is unaware and non-caring about the
biological holocaust that is transpiring each and every day.

The facts are clear. More plant and animal species will go through
extinction within our generation than have been lost thorough natural causes
over the past two hundred million years. Our single human generation, that is,
all people born between 1930 and 2010 will witness the complete obliteration
of one third to one half of all the Earth's life forms, each and every one of
them the product of more than two billion years of evolution. This is
biological meltdown, and what this really means is the end to vertebrate
evolution on planet Earth.

Nature is under siege on a global scale. Biotopes, i.e., environmentally
distinct regions, from tropical and temperate rainforests to coral reefs and
coastal estuaries, are disintegrating in the wake of human onslaught.

The destruction of forests and the proliferation of human activity will
remove more than 20 percent of all terrestrial plant species over the next
fifty years. Because plants form the foundation for entire biotic communities,
their demise will carry with it the extinction of an exponentially greater
number of animal species -- perhaps ten times as many faunal species for each
type of plant eliminated.

Sixty-five million years ago, a natural cataclysmic event resulted in
extinction of the dinosaurs. Even with a plant foundation intact, it took more
than 100,000 years for faunal biological diversity to re-establish itself.
More importantly, the resurrection of biological diversity assumes an intact
zone of tropical forests to provide for new speciation after extinction.
Today, the tropical rain forests are disappearing more rapidly than any other
bio-region, ensuring that after the age of humans, the Earth will remain a
biological, if not a literal desert for eons to come. The present course of
civilization points to ecocide -- the death of nature.

Like a run-a-way train, civilization is speeding along tracks of our own
manufacture towards the stone wall of extinction. The human passengers sitting
comfortably in their seats, laughing, partying, and choosing to not look out
the window. Environmentalists are those perceptive few who have their faces
pressed against the glass, watching the hurling bodies of plants and animals
go screaming by. Environmental activists are those even fewer people who are
trying desperately to break into the fortified engine of greed that propels
this destructive specicidal juggernaut. Others are desperately throwing out
anchors in an attempt to slow the monster down while all the while, the
authorities, blind to their own impending destruction, are clubbing, shooting
and jailing those who would save us all.

SHORT MEMORIES

Civilized humans have for ten thousand years been marching across the face
of the Earth leaving deserts in their footprints. Because we have such short
memories, we forgot the wonder and splendor of a virgin nature. We revise
history and make it fit into our present perceptions.

For instance, are you aware that only two thousand years ago, the coast of
North Africa was a mighty forest? The Phoenicians and the Carthaginians built
powerful ships from the strong timbers of the region. Rome was a major
exporter of timber to Europe. The temple of Jerusalem was built with titanic
cedar logs, one image of which adorns the flag of Lebanon today. Jesus Christ
did not live in a desert, he was a man of the forest. The Sumerians were
renowned for clearing the forests of Mesopotamia for agriculture.

But the destruction of the coastal swath of the North African forest
stopped the rain from advancing into the interior. Without the rain, the trees
died and thus was born the mighty Sahara, sired by man and continued to grow
southward at a rate of ten miles per year, advancing down the length of the
continent of Africa.

And so will go Brazil. The precipitation off the Atlantic strikes the
coastal rain forest and is absorbed and sent skyward again by the trees,
falling further into the interior. Twelve times the moisture falls and twelve
times it is returned to the sky -- all the way to the Andes mountains. Destroy
the coastal swath and desertify Amazonia -- it is as simple as that. Create a
swath anywhere between the coast and the mountains and the rains will be
stopped. We did it before while relatively primitive. We learned nothing. We
forgot.

So too, have we forgotten that walrus once mated and bred along the coast
of Nova Scotia, that sixty million bison once roamed the North American
plains. One hundred years ago, the white bear once roamed the forests of New
England and the Canadian Maritime provinces. Now it is called the polar bear
because that is where it now makes its last stand.

EXTINCTION IS DIFFICULT TO APPRECIATE

Gone forever are the European elephant, lion and tiger. The Labrador duck,
giant auk, Carolina parakeet will never again grace this planet of ours. Lost
for all time are the Atlantic grey whales, the Biscayan right whales and the
Stellar sea cow. Our children will never look upon the California condor in
the wild or watch the Palos Verde blue butterfly dart from flower to
flower.

Extinction is a difficult concept to fully appreciate. What has been is no
more and never shall be again. It would take another creation and billions of
years to recreate the passenger pigeon. It is the loss of billions of years of
evolutionary programming. It is the destruction of beauty, the obliteration of
truth, the removal of uniqueness, the scarring of the sacred web of life

To be responsible for an extinction is to commit blasphemy against the
divine. It is the greatest of all possible crimes, more evil than murder, more
appalling than genocide, more monstrous than even the apparent unlimited
perversities of the human mind. To be responsible for the complete and utter
destruction of a unique and sacred life form is arrogance that seethes with
evil, for the very opposite of evil is live. It is no accident that these two
words spell out each other in reverse.

And yet, a reporter in California recently told me that "all the redwoods
in California are not worth the life on one human being." What incredible
arrogance. The rights a species, any species, must take precedence over the
life of an individual or another species. This is a basic ecological law. It
is not to be tampered with by primates who have molded themselves into divine
legends in their own mind. For each and every one of the thirty million plus
species that grace this beautiful planet are essential for the continued
well-being of which we are all a part, the planet Earth -- the divine entity
which brought us forth from the fertility of her sacred womb.

As a sea-captain I like to compare the structural integrity of the
biosphere to that of a ship's hull. Each species is a rivet that keeps the
hull intact. If I were to go into my engine room and find my engineers busily
popping rivets from the hull, I would be upset and naturally I would ask them
what they were doing.

If they told me that they discovered that they could make a dollar each
from the rivets, I could do one of three things. I could ignore them. I could
ask them to cut me in for a share of the profits, or I could kick their asses
out of the engine room and off my ship. If I was a responsible captain, I
would do the latter. If I did not, I would soon find the ocean pouring through
the holes left by the stolen rivets and very shortly after, my ship, my crew
and myself would disappear beneath the waves.

And that is the state of the world today. The political leaders, i.e., the
captains at the helms of their nation states, are ignoring the rivet poppers
or they are cutting themselves in for the profits. There are very few asses
being kicked out of the engine room of spaceship Earth.

With the rivet poppers in command, it will not be long until the biospheric
integrity of the Earth collapses under the weight of ecological strain and
tides of death come pouring in. And that will be the price of progress --
ecological collapse, the death of nature, and with it the horrendous and mind
numbing specter of massive human destruction.

And where does that leave us, dear reader? Do you intend to remain in your
seat, oblivious to the impending destruction? Have you got you face pressed up
against the window, watching the grim reapings of progress? Or are you engaged
in throwing out anchors, sacrificing the materialistic pleasures of
civilization and risking your all, that your planet and your children may
live?

The choice is unique to this generation. Future generations will not have
the chance and those that came before us did not have the vision nor
theknowledge. It is up to us -- you and I.

Remain a parasite OR become an Earth Warrior. Serve your Mother and prosper
OR serve civilization and besmear yourself with the filth and guilt of
ecocide.

for more about Paul Watson, and what is happening now, see Sea Shepherd website.